


(Would you) make a saint of me?

by samvelg



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Crowley Was Raphael Before Falling (Good Omens), Crowley has Trauma from the Fall (Good Omens), Drinking & Talking, Drinking to Cope, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional literacy is my kink, Existential Angst, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Misunderstandings, Oblivious Aziraphale (Good Omens), Other, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Reconciliation, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, Yelling at stained glass windows, Yelling at yourself, yelling at god
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 12:08:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21099227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samvelg/pseuds/samvelg
Summary: You would think it’d get easier to ignore unresolved trauma when it passed the 6000 year mark.You’d be wrong.Stuck in between Heaven and Hell with a head full of memories and a very long lifetime of scars, all Crowley can do is keep his chin up and enjoy his post-apocalyptic retirement with his angel by his side. When the repercussions of an argument, a misunderstanding and a chance encounter bring up ancient history long gone and never (ever) forgotten, Crowley is left watching it all come crashing down.





	(Would you) make a saint of me?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Heaven Help Us | Good Omens Animatic](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/528509) by foxssie. 

> Hello my glorious heathens! No idea if any of my regular readers are checking this out or if it's strictly my fellow thirsty Good Omens fans but either way welcome to my first Good Omens fic!
> 
> (Not including Correction Fluid of course which was posted earlier this week, the scorching hot and hilariously heartful Aziraphale/Crowley tax porn we all deserved I collaborated on with a bunch of other amazing writers from the Good Omens Big Bang discord server. 11 writers and 16k words in 48 hours, seriously check it out).
> 
> This fic was already being written because I just had to get my twitchy little hands on the angst potential of Raphael!Crowley, but it was missing something until I saw Heaven Help Us on YouTube and LOST MY MIND. So here we go (with full permission from the artist), not so much a retelling of the story in that insanely good animatic but one which is very heavily inspired by it and some of the moments in it which punched me straight in the face. 
> 
> Beta'd by the amazing miss-minnelli who is an angel in her own right for rolling with my over-excited rambling and helping me polish this into something I'm really happy with ♡

It was nearly a year since Armagedonotpassgo, and in London an angel and a demon had been rather enjoying their retirement so far. 

After eleven years of stress there had been picnics at the park, lunches at the Ritz and lots of little restaurants where they know you. It was wonderful. The world was just as vibrant, boring and miraculous as it had always been but there was one thing which normally made it perfect, and that was Aziraphale. But Crowley wasn't thinking about that right now. 

Instead, he was sprawled on the curb in front of St Raphael's Roman Catholic Church in Wiltshire-on-Thames as close as he could get without risking the integrity of his epidermis for the privilege. It was not his best idea ever, (that had unanimously been popping up a wall to say hello to a nervous looking angel). Neither was the miraculously refilling flask of gin he was drinking from - which he had indeed been drinking from for the better part of the last two hours - or the fact that while all of this was going on he was talking to God. 

Multitasking was an underrated skill in Crowley's opinion. Right up there with being a high-functioning alcoholic with the ability to not only miracle a nice bottomless flask of what some of the humans affectionately called the devil's left hand out of raw firmament if you got desperate enough, but also to purge your system of intoxicants at will when you were done. 

And as he (Gluttonously) drank his way through the better part of a cask of Bombay Sapphire, his ranting travelled the familiar winding path through anger at himself and the world at large for his many and varied fuck-ups (Wrath), resenting everyone who didn't have to put up with the shit he did as a result of said fuck-ups (Envy) and a total disinclination to admit he was to blame about any of it (Pride). It seemed like an excellent idea that when he was done swearing at the sky he should go back to his pretentious designer flat (Greed) and wank like a fiend (Lust) until he passed out for the foreseeable future (Sloth). Nothing like speedrunning the Seven Deadly No-No's to remind himself who and what he really was.

For a brief moment he flashed back to earlier that afternoon with Aziraphale, before firmly grabbing his thoughts by the rein and yanking them back on track. 

"So y'see." He told the sky. "That's why this is all some big cons - conpic - conspri - some big ol' cover up. Either you know all an' see all and actually wanted this blessed mess to happen, or, or, you don't actually know fuck all. That's check  _ and _ mate to you Mum."

The sky didn't answer him. To be fair, it never did, not even once since before Time began, but he had still never quite stopped feeling miffed about it. 

"You know, while it is true that the Lord is in all things you might have a better chance of being heard if you go inside."

Annoyed by the interruption to his rant, Crowley tilted his head back to see a blessed priest of all blessed things staring down at him.

"Doesssn't matter where I go." He replied somewhere in the shady neighbourhood between a slur and a hiss. "God's not listening. That ship didn't just sail, it crassshed and burned into a sulphur pit at terminal velocity."

The priest's eyebrows raised a little. "That bad huh?"

"Oh yeah." He agreed, not exactly in the mood to give away all his deepest, darkest secrets, but undeniably gratified by the presence of an audience who would talk back. Even if the audience in question was a tranquil looking priest who had to be pushing seventy if he was a day. "Worse even."

The priest looked sympathetic. "I'm very sorry to hear that."

Crowley screwed his face up, the gin tasting especially bitter on his forked tongue. "O'course you are, you holy types are always  _ sorry _ aren't you? Fat lot of good sorry does if you ask me."

"Perhaps. Though I have to wonder, if where you go really doesn't matter then why did you end up here of all places?"

"What, you pissed I'm putting off your regular customers?" Crowley sneered, slouching back even further and determined to make even more of a nuisance of himself. "Am I low'ring the spiritual market value or something with my unholy arse? Well if God wants me to move She can get off her blessed Throne and sssmite me Herself for once instead of outsourcing it."

Far from being even half as offended by his casual blasphemy as most men of the cloth he'd known over the years would have been - to say nothing of his referring to the Almighty Creator of everything by  _ feminine pronouns _ , Satan forbid - the priest just smiled. "Not at all. Churches are here to provide shelter and comfort to anyone in need, and I hope you'll forgive me for saying so, but anyone knocking back something which smells like paint thinner in front of a church this late in the afternoon while monologuing at the sky is likely in need of both."

"Well I can't argue with that now can I?" Crowley sighed, suddenly feeling so bloody tired he might just skip over the wanking part of his cunning plan and get straight to the sleeping. 

The priest looked at him shrewdly for a moment. "What's your name?"

Well, wasn't that the million dollar question? "Anthony will do."

"Then it's nice to meet you Anthony. I'm Father Tobias."

Of fucking course it was. Because the ways in which his life was a cosmic punchline were both many and varied.

"Pleasure." He drawled and then, because he was a demon and couldn't just be having any (moderately) polite conversations with priests even if he was retired, he held out his bottomless flask with a tempting little wiggle. "Want some?"

"Thank you but no." Replied Father Tobias with a small smile. "I'm more of a scotch man myself."

Crowley bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from bursting out laughing. "Fair enough. I usually am too but today..." He trailed off, gesturing with both hands at the still offensively oblique sky. "Much more of a gin occasion. There's something sincere about how juniper berries are clearly so pissed at being turned into alcohol that they take it out on you."

Father Tobias was still looking down at him like he was both concerned and reluctantly charmed. "Do you want to talk about it?"

The faint smile on his face after his explanation of why gin was the best choice for the spiteful vanished. "About what?"

"About why you were shouting at God for making you an idiot in the first place."

Bugger, he must have been listening in for while then. "Ah, that."

"Mmhmm."

"I'm too drunk for this." He mumbled, rubbing his eyes under his sunglasses and wondering if he could just ask the priest to bless him out of his own misery.

"Why don't you come inside out of the cold?" Said Father Tobias soothingly, clearly an old hand at calming down the god-fearing and god-forsaken alike. "I'll make you a cup of tea and we'll see if we can't sober you up a bit."

He snorted. "Wouldn't be a good idea Padre, I know when I'm not welcome."

"Everyone is welcome in the house of God, Anthony."

Crowley actually did laugh this time but it was a bitter, broken thing, with not even the flickering embers of humour still burning in the wreckage. "Pretty sure there's rules against folks like me."

"Oh." He could see the cogs ticking away in Father Tobias' head, no doubt making some assumptions as to his meaning based on the various context clues of how he dressed and how he talked and coming up with the wrong thing entirely, even though it was probably about as close as anything else most human beings were equipped to understand. "Well I know it's not been the case historically, but we are only human and as such our ability to understand the fullness of His Plan is dependent on our own wisdom. His Holiness says we are all as God made us and we all deserve love and mercy, and on a more personal level I've always felt it wasn't my place to second-guess Him or pass judgment on others for what He has chosen for them."

He shook his head, because there was no chance in Heaven he was doing the masochist's two-step on holy ground again, after the last time his scales had been sensitive for  _ years _ . "Don't worry, I won't be driving myself back to London so you won't have my messy death via negligence on your conscience."

It wasn't even a lie either, the Bentley would definitely be driving him home with very little in the way of his own input.

Crowley was just getting up, head fuzzy and trying to remind himself how legs worked (because even after six millennia he was still in his heart of hearts a snake) when - distracted by the utter ridiculousness which was having to own a working set of hips - he misjudged where he was putting his stupid feet. He slipped on an overly smooth tile, and after a lot of rather inelegant flailing ended up (quite appropriately perhaps) falling onto his hands and knees. 

His hands and knees, which were now well inside the boundary of the consecrated grounds of the church.

Father Tobias was fussing over him like all English men past a certain age like to do, trying to help him up while not wanting to be too familiar or tactile, and he was so busy fending off the well-intentioned fussing and bracing himself for the pain that it took him a few seconds to register that he wasn't actually in any. Anthony J Crowley, a quite literally Godforsaken demon and the actual Serpent of Eden to boot, was on holy ground and wasn't burning up like the apostate he was. 

_ "What the actual fucking hell?" _

Father Tobias was looking increasingly concerned. "Are you alright Anthony?"

Something in his expression must have communicated just how un-alright he was even with the comforting obfuscation of his sunglasses, or maybe the priest picked up on the increasingly violent shaking in his hands as his corporation went on autopilot while he tried to understand what the Heaven was happening. Either way, he rested his own, much more steady hand on Crowley's shoulder and carefully ushered the bluescreening demon into his church.

Crowley for his part felt like his brain had been knocked out like a mobile phone network besieged by rats, there was no other way to describe it. The initial shock hadn't worn off and had settled in for the long haul with a cup of tea and a pack of biscuits, and all he could do was watch his own feet as he was led up the stone steps which by rights should have been burning like he was Falling all over again. It never came though. 

Briefly he wondered if perhaps the church had somehow lost it's consecration, but no, he could still feel the ethereal energy tickling at the edge of his awareness. And even if that was entirely his imagination the level of demonic corruption necessary to do something to a church's consecration would've been as easy for him to pick up on as Aziraphale could pick up someone's love for their fellow man.

Nope, still not thinking about Aziraphale

So it came to be that Crowley staggered into his own church with a flask in one hand and a man called Tobias in the other, and it sounded like the start to a bad joke. Seriously, all he needed was a trumpet, a fish and a staff to round out the set and then this might just be the most morbidly ironic thing to happen to him since having to drive through the M25 he'd helped design while it was on fire.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope y'all enjoyed! Tune in next time for theological discussions and a lot of angsting over stained glass windows 👍
> 
> http://samvelg-likes-things.tumblr.com


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